The War of the Wenuses eBook

The Coming of the Wenuses.

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I.

“Justbeforethebattle,
mother.”

No one would have believed in the first years of the
twentieth century that men and modistes on this planet
were being watched by intelligences greater than woman’s
and yet as ambitious as her own. With infinite
complacency maids and matrons went to and fro over
London, serene in the assurance of their empire over
man. It is possible that the mysticetus does
the same. Not one of them gave a thought to Wenus
as a source of danger, or thought of it only to dismiss
the idea of active rivalry upon it as impossible or
improbable. Yet across the gulf of space astral
women, with eyes that are to the eyes of English women
as diamonds are to boot-buttons, astral women, with
hearts vast and warm and sympathetic, were regarding
Butterick’s with envy, Peter Robinson’s
with jealousy, and Whiteley’s with insatiable
yearning, and slowly and surely maturing their plans
for a grand inter-stellar campaign.

The pale pink planet Wenus, as I need hardly inform
the sober reader, revolves round the sun at a mean
distance of [character: Venus sigil] vermillion
miles. More than that, as has been proved by the
recent observations of Puits of Paris, its orbit is
steadily but surely advancing sunward. That is
to say, it is rapidly becoming too hot for clothes
to be worn at all; and this, to the Wenuses, was so
alarming a prospect that the immediate problem of
life became the discovery of new quarters notable
for a gentler climate and more copious fashions.
The last stage of struggle-for-dress, which is to
us still remote, had embellished their charms, heightened
their heels and enlarged their hearts. Moreover,
the population of Wenus consisted exclusively of Invisible
Men—­and the Wenuses were about tired of
it. Let us, however, not judge them too harshly.
Remember what ruthless havoc our own species has wrought,
not only on animals such as the Moa and the Maori,
but upon its own inferior races such as the Wanishing
Lady and the Dodo Bensonii.

The Wenuses seem to have calculated their descent
with quite un-feminine accuracy. Had our instruments
permitted it, we might have witnessed their preparations.
Similarly pigs, had they wings, might fly. Men
like Quellen of Dresden watched the pale pink planet—­it
is odd, by the way, that for countless centuries Wenus
has been the star of Eve—­evening by evening
growing alternately paler and pinker than a literary
agent, but failed to interpret the extraordinary phenomena,
resembling a series of powder puffs, which he observed
issuing from the cardiac penumbra on the night of
April 1st, 1902. At the same time a great light
was remarked by Idos of Yokohama and Pegadiadis of
Athens.

The storm burst upon us six weeks later, about the
time of the summer sales. As Wenus approached
opposition, Dr. Jelli of Guava set the wires of the
astronomical exchange palpitating with the intelligence
of a huge explosion of laughing gas moving risibly
towards the earth. He compared it to a colossal
cosmic cachinnation. And, in the light of subsequent
events, the justice of the comparison will commend
itself to all but the most sober readers.